Just Like That

by Nicola Rendell

  That’s when a face pops up from the hedge. A familiar face.

  Sonny Bono.

  No, wait. Goddammit.

  The mayor.

  “Jesus!” he whisper-yells. “Mr. Stevenson!”

  Apart from my utter surprise at seeing the mayor pop up from the bushes, I feel pretty fucking good about this. I thought I was going to have to spend the day at City Hall digging up tax records and trying to see if he had any shady shell corporations. But nope. The guy’s a peeping Tom. Hole in one. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He pops up from the bushes all the way. “Just doing a little light weeding,” says the mayor, with a dandelion in his fist, dirt tumbling from the bare roots. On his knees are gardening pads. He’s got a spade in his hand, and he’s wearing and a hat with a wide brim, safari-style.

  “Weeding.” I don’t even make it a question. No need to be polite.

  He nods so hard it makes his huge sunglasses slide right down his nose. “I talked to Penny yesterday, and she sounded a little blue. So I came on over to check on her. But then I saw she had a visitor, and I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “Weeding? Why are you weeding her yard?”

  He looks at the dandelion in his hand. “Because Penny hates weeding, and Penny helps me from losing my marbles. So I do Penny’s weeding.” He looks completely puzzled about why this is even a question. Like it’s one of the accepted truths of the world. Gravity, inertia, weeding for Penny.

  Man, I might have seriously misjudged this guy. Weeding at six a.m. on a Saturday out of gratitude? People have been sainted for less. I rub my temples, inhaling the sweet smell of slightly damp grass. Guppy, meanwhile, has totally lost interest, like this is actually a pretty regular occurrence. He takes a spectacularly long piss on a stone-dead clump of daisies.

  From the right-hand side of the street comes a cop car, going slow. The mayor, too, watches it roll up and come to a stop.

  Fuck the Mr. Nice Guy routine. Clearly, someone called the cops. Weeding, my ass.

  But then the patrol car window rolls down, and the cop says, “Morning, Mayor. How’s the weeding?”

  “Morning, Sheriff! Pretty good!” the mayor says, holding up the dandelion and shaking off some dirt. “How’s your morning going, Todd?”

  The whole scene is mind-boggling. I grew up in Boston, where you’ve got to be a blood relative to get someone to look you in the eye. I’ve never seen anything like this place in my life. It’s so fucking nice here, everybody’s so fucking friendly, I’m pretty sure we’re about five seconds away from a spontaneous musical number. I can see it now: the whole neighborhood in their bathrobes, holding hands, singing “It’s a Beautiful Morning” as they walk in formation down the street.

  It’s too damned early for all this wholesome shit. She’s in bed, and I need to be there, too. I turn back toward the house, whistle for Guppy, and close the door behind us.

  “Morning,” says Penny, sleepily stretching by the bedroom door. “What are you doing up?”

  Outside I hear the mayor say, “What do you say to a cup of coffee at the diner, Sheriff Todd? I’ve got some volunteer ideas to discuss.”

  I rub my eye with my knuckle. “The mayor does your weeding?”

  She looks past me at the frosty outline of the mayor, leaning on the cruiser. “Most Saturdays. Unless he’s doing a fun run for kids with cancer or something.”

  Jesus Christ, to hell with the mayor, to hell with work, to hell with all of it. She’s the only thing that matters now. “Get your ass back in bed, cutie,” I say, pulling her to me, making her gasp as our bodies collide. “I’m not ready to get up yet.”

  She looks down at my boxers. “I’d say you’re up already.”

  “Bed. Now,” I say, and slap her ass, which fills the house with her shrieks and giggles.

  30

  Penny

  By 11 a.m. my skin is slick with his sweat and mine. My clit is buzzing with the aftershocks of two orgasms, back to back, for both of us. As he catches his breath, I perch my chin on his sternum and let my head rise and fall with his breathing. He tucks one forearm behind his head, propping up his neck to see me better. He moves a sweaty tendril of my hair off my forehead. “You ever had one of those chocolate bars from Mexico? One of those ones laced with chiles or whatever?”

  Now he’s really speaking my language. “I’ve got a whole case of them stacked up in my freezer, the only tried-and-true PMS cure.”

  “You’re like that. Sweet at first, but spicy underneath. Fuck.”

  I press my lips to his chest, feeling embarrassed, and just watch him. He links his hand into mine and watches me, too. For the first time in my life, I know what it means to get lost in someone’s eyes, lost in that place where you aren’t speaking, but you’re saying everything you don’t know how to say. That I like you, a lot. That you make me feel like the most beautiful woman ever, and that maybe we should do something crazy. Maybe we should fall in love. But I don’t say it. I keep it to myself, in my heart, where it’s going to have to stay.

  When the midday sun blasts the bed with a shaft of hot light, I roll off of him to go turn up the AC unit in the window. But when my feet hit the ground, it’s like my muscles aren’t even connected to my bones, and I’ve got to support myself on the dresser.

  He springs up to help me, scooping me up in his arms to steady me. “You good? Maybe you need to eat something. It’s getting late.”

  “Oh, you animal,” I say, giving him an elbow to the rock-solid abs. “You did this.”

  His looks suddenly very smug. “I fucked you until you can’t walk.”

  I nod at him.

  “Holy shit, for the motherfucking win!” He scoops me up in his arms, newlywed style. He carries me to the bathroom and sets me down in front of the sink.

  “I’m fine,” I say, watching my thigh muscles tremble in the mirror.

  “You sure are,” he says with a wink.

  He unpacks his bathroom kit in one corner of my sink. Tidy bottles, filled to the top. His razor. His cologne. I love seeing his things all mixed up with mine, but then the angel starts talking sense again. Don’t get attached, Penelope. It’s a fling. Just a fling.

  He puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush, and I do the same, watching him watching me in the mirror. Around the toothbrush, his mouth full of foam, he says, “Is there any more marmalade?”

  “Gallons,” I answer, my mouth full of toothpaste, too. “And pickles. Lots of pickles.”

  In response to which he gives me a little nudge to my ass with his finally half-soft cock, to say, I’ll show you a pickle.

  For the rest of our lazy morning, every single mundane detail seems magical. Being with him is easy—we never bump into each other in my tiny kitchen even once. We have banana bread, coffee, and marmalade. We sit at my little breakfast table and read the news on our phones. He catches me reading my horoscope and doesn’t give me any shit for it at all. I watch him reading about politics, though he seems particularly interested in science and…the arts.

  Heavens.

  But when Guppy brings his ball over, I stand up and head for the door. Couplehood has its limits. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to run him down the beach a little.”

  Russ grabs his hat. “I’m coming with you. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  And so we head down the shore together. Halfway down the Point, I look back at our parallel footprints, threading their way along the damp sand. In our footprints, it is all so beautifully simple. There’s no worry about flings there, or complications. It’s a man and a woman and a dog. A little family. And the thing, I realize, looking back on the long line of prints, that I never knew I was aching to have.

  Not until now.

  * * *

  After our walk, I give Guppy a handful of cookies. Russ holds the front door open, keys in hand. He’s wearing a different outfit from Surf’s Up, but it’s just as sexy as yesterday’s: a pair of navy shorts and another pre-faded
T-shirt, this one dark green. He’s got his sexy baseball cap on, and I’m wearing a sun hat…because he insisted. “No, you’re not going out there without a hat. And sunscreen. Sorry, Penny. Sorry.”

  It didn’t even make me mad, it didn’t even wake my sleeping inner feminist dragon. Instead, it melted me into a puddle and made me think that maybe this whole time, I’ve been looking for a man who insists. Who won’t back down when I give him my best scowl, who doesn’t let me win no matter what I say. He is the SPF 50 of hunks, and that’s perfectly okay with me.

  As we make our way down Main Street, he lifts his sunglasses. “Is that a Starbucks? Holy shit.”

  “Oh, you.” I give him a shove. “We’re not that Podunk.”

  He puts on the turn signal and pulls into an empty space in front of the store. “Penny. The lady at the Residence Inn warned me about fungal infections at the Y. I expect nothing.”

  I groan at the roof of the Suburban. “I answered that complaint myself. There was no fungus.”

  But he laughs it off and moves the gearshift from drive to park. “What do you want?”

  “An iced tea. Black, no sugar.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, coffee makes me—” I clear my throat. “—babble.”

  He cocks his head as he opens his door. He’s left the keys in the ignition and the engine running, so the AC stays on. “I like when you babble.”

  “You’re sweet, but there’s no need to flatter me. Maisie says the over-sharing is very unattractive.” In fact, her choice word was spinster-making, but I leave that out.

  He scoffs. “I don’t think anything about you is unattractive.” He leans in and points. “Nothing. So one iced tea, coming right up. Vanilla scone?”

  It’s like he’s known me forever. “Yes, please.”

  And off he goes. I watch him and his tush make their way into the storefront, and I cross my still-trembling legs. But as I do, something pokes me in the back of the thigh. I look down and see a small folder wedged between the console and my seat. It’s a brochure-sized folder and I pull it out. It says Hertz on the front and I realize that it’s his rental agreement. I pop open his glove box to put it inside, but as I start to tuck it beside the driver’s manual I notice…

  The name on the front? It doesn’t say Russ Stevenson.

  It says Russ Macklin.

  Macklin. Not Stevenson.

  That cannot be. I rip off my sunglasses and snatch up the folder in both hands. But it’s not a typo, and it’s not my vision. It’s right there in great big bold letters.

  Russell T. Macklin

  I think back to the meeting with the mayor. Stevenson, he definitely said Stevenson. But there’s no Stevenson anywhere. My heart starts pounding in my chest, a panicked tumble of quickly spreading doubt. He cannot have lied about his name. That’s impossible. That’s insane. Because if he lied about that, he probably lied about….

  Everything.

  I thumb through the thin printouts, tissue-thin duplicates from some sort of out-of-date printer. Every signature has Russell T. Macklin printed underneath it. His signature itself is a big manly R followed by a squiggle, and then a solid M with another squiggle. He’s initialed RTM at the bottom of each page. And there on the second page is the information taken from his license.

  Driver: Russell T. Macklin

  Licensing state: Massachusetts

  I look away from the papers and try to make all sorts of possible justifications. He did say he was from there. Maybe he just moved to California. When Maisie moved to Maryland for a few years, she never turned in her Florida license. Could be exactly like that, probably. Maybe. Hopefully. Except then even that fizzles out underneath something even worse.

  Current address:

  1023 Worcester St. Apt. 4A

  Boston, MA 05412

  Nowhere on any of the pages do I see California, or Hollywood, or anything that makes any sense at all.

  Except to explain the obvious. The heartbreaking, forehead-smacking, anger-spurring truth: that I’ve done it again. I fell off the Man Wagon and into the arms of…

  I glance up and see him waiting at the counter, his burly back to me, his muscles defined even from thirty feet away.

  A liar.

  Bastard! Location scout, my ass. He probably sells life insurance or manages a hedge fund, or worst of all, he works for that turd Dick Dickerson. He probably has a wife and two children and a minivan up there in Boston, with the snow and the clam chowder. No wonder he doesn’t have a California tan.

  I catch a glimpse of him in profile, putting a lid on his coffee and thanking the barista, who’s shaking up my tea.

  What is he doing here? Who is he?

  I am such an idiot.

  And how the hell did I manage to land another bullshitter?

  My thoughts don’t even feel like my own. It’s fight or flight, and I’m not hanging around for details. I haven’t forgotten some painful lessons from the last year. I will not be with a man who lies to me. No matter the explanation, I won’t believe it. He started with a lie, and it’ll end with more lies. I won’t be a part of any of it.

  So I open my door, unbuckle my seatbelt, and grab my purse. And then I do what I should have done every single time I got entangled in some romantic mess that wasn’t worth all the heartache, what I should have done every single time I suspected something sounded a little funny, or a man said, “We’re not actually divorced yet, but close!” I clench my fists, set my teeth, turn on my heel…

  And get the hell out of there.

  * * *

  I pound on the door of Surf’s Up and hear Maisie holler, “Closed for inventory! Closed! The opposite of open!” I pound again, harder, a flat-handed thump on the plate-glass door that makes the bell inside jingle with every whack.

  Maisie’s head pops up from behind a stack of boxes. As soon as she sees it’s me, her mouth moves to say a silent, “Uh-oh.”

  She comes to the door and unlocks the first deadbolt and then the second with the keys that she keeps on a lanyard around her neck. We are only inches from each other, and as her eyes connect with mine, those familiar eyes that I know so well, tears cloud my vision and my lips begin to quiver.

  “Hang on, hang on,” she says, fussing with yet another lock. She reaches up and unbolts the latch on the top. Finally, the door swings open. “What happened? Where’s Captain America? Are you okay?”

  Captain America. I am not okay. I am sweating profusely, there are tears streaming down my face, and I marched over here with so much fury that I made my thighs chafe, so now they’re throbbing and stinging in addition to feeling like they will never be the same after what he did to me. I blubber through a sob, feeling so ridiculous and so tiny and so stupid, stupid, stupid. Slowly, Maisie teases the story from me in bits and pieces. I sniffle out some parts and growl through others. All the joy of the last few days falls away, leaving me feeling used, useless, and absolutely spent.

  Maisie pulls me to her, and I’m overcome with a cloud of lavender oil. Her cool, soft skin slides against the sweat on my arms, and I let my head fall to her bony shoulder. She says, “Maybe it’s for the best.”

  But wound together with the things that he must have lied about are others that he couldn’t have lied about. The laughter and the chemistry and… “He quotes Dickens, Maisie. Dickens.”

  “Honey. Your bar is set at the weirdest level,” Maisie says. She gives me one final squeeze and locks the door behind me. Then she pulls a bobby pin from her hair and puts it in my palm. “I’ll get my computer from my bag and you break into the bubble gum machine. Then we’ll see what the internet has to say about Captain America.”

  * * *

  What we find is a very slick, very professional website with lots of sharp black backgrounds and sans-serif fonts, talking about his work as a private investigator, about his exemplary investigative methods, about his discretion, about his team of highly skilled associates. MACKLIN INVESTIGATIONS says the banner a
cross the top of each page.

  Maisie asks, “Whffsf afsuvestef deefed retend doba mufsct?”

  Her words are all garbled because we’ve both stuffed our faces with as many half-stale pieces of bubble gum as our cheeks can hold. I understand her only because it’s exactly what I’m thinking, too.

  What’s a private investigator doing pretending to be a movie scout?

  I lean back on the little shelves under the cash register. Maisie sits across from me in lotus pose, with her nose wrinkled at her laptop. She chews hard and wipes some of the candy coating from her lips with the back of her hand. When her wad of gum gets to a manageable size, she asks, “Military?” and turns her laptop around on her lap. On the screen is a full-sized photo of Russ. In fatigues.

  I jam another gumball into my mouth and groan. Just as sexy as I imagined him. Hotter, even. With a gun, in the desert. Suntanned, dusty. With that black makeup like football players wear on their cheeks. Lord, oh Lord.

  But Maisie’s not so easily swayed. “Pretty hinky if you ask me,” she says, turning the laptop back to face her. “This has Polyamorous Relationship in Atlanta written all over it.”

  I’d be offended if we didn’t both know that story from first-hand experience. What is wrong with me? “How does a person become a nun? Can I just do that? Do I just show up at the church? Is that how it works?”

  She scrolls through more photos, saying, “I think you have to have some sort of belief sys…” She freezes, mid-scroll, with her fingers perched above the mouse. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “This has to be Photoshopped.”

  I grab the laptop from her and take a look.

  It’s him springing off a diving board, in his full glory, whizzing through the air toward a huge swimming pool. Every single muscle is rippling, every single inch is perfect. The spandex of his diving shorts—no bigger than a pair of my boy shorts—accentuates every bulge and curve. The headline on the story says, Michigan State Beats Florida in Diving Thanks to Macklin.